Well that's just so wrong it's ridiculous, Mastery > Haste for holy as well. Haste 'breakpoint' is so over-rated and HW:Sanc you shouldnever use.

I've been playing Holy since vanilla MC and @ every expansion release I have had a terrible first 2 months since holypriest without any gear (aka regen) is just terrible. Took me a long while to get used to it again but now I feel much more relaxed about my mana. You just have to give it more time to feel 'safe' as holy as well.

I've never ever liked disc so always refused to play it, atm though it is the best healing spec. It's essentially mandatory when you have to use 3 healers on some fights. Oh well, I get by with Holy, can be on par with the disc priest in my raid sometimes but usually I cannot get near him. I expect they will get nerfed sometime in the future though, so just play what you like best.

Well that's just so wrong it's ridiculous, Mastery > Haste for holy as well. Haste 'breakpoint' is so over-rated and HW:Sanc you shouldnever use.

I've been playing Holy since vanilla MC and @ every expansion release I have had a terrible first 2 months since holypriest without any gear (aka regen) is just terrible. Took me a long while to get used to it again but now I feel much more relaxed about my mana. You just have to give it more time to feel 'safe' as holy as well.

I've never ever liked disc so always refused to play it, atm though it is the best healing spec. It's essentially mandatory when you have to use 3 healers on some fights. Oh well, I get by with Holy, can be on par with the disc priest in my raid sometimes but usually I cannot get near him. I expect they will get nerfed sometime in the future though, so just play what you like best.

Haste should come before mastery, in Holy spec. There are numerous websites that have updated guides and stat priorities. Give some a look

Well that's just so wrong it's ridiculous, Mastery > Haste for holy as well. Haste 'breakpoint' is so over-rated and HW:Sanc you shouldnever use.

I've been playing Holy since vanilla MC and @ every expansion release I have had a terrible first 2 months since holypriest without any gear (aka regen) is just terrible. Took me a long while to get used to it again but now I feel much more relaxed about my mana. You just have to give it more time to feel 'safe' as holy as well.

I've never ever liked disc so always refused to play it, atm though it is the best healing spec. It's essentially mandatory when you have to use 3 healers on some fights. Oh well, I get by with Holy, can be on par with the disc priest in my raid sometimes but usually I cannot get near him. I expect they will get nerfed sometime in the future though, so just play what you like best.

You're unfortunately mistaken.
Let's say you have 8000 points you can move freely between haste or mastery.
If you put them straight into haste, that's gonna bring you to 25% spell haste, meaning you complete 25% more casts within the same timeframe, that's a flat 25% output increase. Plus ontop of that, you'll be gaining 25% extra healing (approx, likely a bit lower) on all HoT casts, because they'll gain 25% additional ticks over the same duration. If 60% of your healing is HoTs (just an example) then you can assume 10-15% increase in healing from that as well, putting you to a 35-40% increase in healing from that 8000 haste.

However, if you put 8000 points into mastery, you'd gain a set percentage of mastery based on whatever it is for points per %. Holy priest gain 1% of mastery for every 480 mastery at lvl 90.
so, that means you're gaining almost 17% mastery, on top of the already 10% base and 6.25% from buffs. Putting you to 33.25% mastery.

The overall net gain from haste more than twice as much healing in comparison from this as you can see from the numbers, 17% vs 35-40%

As mentioned before, the only downside to running a haste build is that is uses that much more mana as well. If you get 25% more casts, thats 25% more mana you use. So it becomes a personal choice of how much haste you want to stack.

Edit - Correction on the 25% haste, that should be 20%, I forgot about the scaling with spell haste buff, its 18.8% haste multiplied by 1.05. The benefit will be 20% when it's all said and done.

Stat priorities will and always have varied on a person by person basis. There are so many factors that play into it as a healer that haste versus mastery isn't a debate, because THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER. Do you raid 10 or 25 man, do you raid normals or heroics, do you raid with a holy pally, do you raid with another priest, do you raid with a druid, what is your ilvl, etc, etc, etc.

Everyone has a different raiding environment, level of gear, and play style. Your reforging should match what spells you cast the most. You have to analyze logs to figure that out, and it probably varies on a fight by fight basis. The spells may benefit more from mastery or haste, it will be different for a lot of people.

But....that's not the point of this thread. To the OP, as others have said, play whichever you want. Run through some LFR as both holy and disc and get a feel for them in a raiding environment, if you haven't already. If you feel more comfortable as disc with your mana regen, you may want to stick with it. I've played both over the years, recently swapped from holy back to disc with the nice changes lately, and like them both also. I think disc will benefit my raid group better right now, so I'll be sticking with it for the time being. If we get to a fight where it looks like holy will work out better, then I'll swap. That's the great thing about priests, we can switch between two awesome healing specs whenever we need to!

Stat priorities will and always have varied on a person by person basis. There are so many factors that play into it as a healer that haste versus mastery isn't a debate, because THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER.

You are wrong, there is a right answer. It's all based on math/numbers, and numbers don't lie. 2+2 is always 4.

@ Sakamae , I couldn't have said it better. There is no simply black/white , right/wrong choice in healing.

People with that attitude never perform to their fullest. If you joined a hardcore guild, they would require you to perform 100% every time. This is not possible if you cannot grasp the fact that there infact is a mathematically correct way of healing. Kungen of Nihilum has said that, when they recruited new people, these players were always 15-20% below Nihilum players the first two weeks of trial. These were all players from top 10 europe guilds, and best in their guild. After a month or so, they were somewhat on par with the core players in performance. They were forced to play in a whole different way to even stay in the guild. I know it's along time ago, but it's still true.

Imagine that your Guild Master told you "Okay, your gearscore is 480 so you will be expected to do 50k healing on average when we raid, if you dont, you're out". This is what would happen if you joined a hardcore guild.

I guess you were one of those priests who were spamming renew in 25 HC ICC and told people that it was the only viable playing style as a hpriest?

@ Sakamae , I couldn't have said it better. There is no simple black/white , right/wrong choice in healing.

Every Healing class in WotLK spammed anything they wanted. Mana was infinite. Healers didn't cast spells with mana in mind. I played WotLK on my Druid and I spammed Rejuv on every Raid member...why? Cause I could. Same went for Renew with Priests...they could.

There was no "technique or skill" involved with WotLK healing. "Be there and press all your healing buttons, whenever you want" was all that mattered.

You are wrong, there is a right answer. It's all based on math/numbers, and numbers don't lie. 2+2 is always 4.

Not in Base3, 2 + 2 = 11

But back on topic, Disc is OP right now, if you don't have a disc priest, go disc. If you do, well go disc anyway and bubble everything they want to bubble to annoy them so much they quit and you are the only disc priest

People with that attitude never perform to their fullest. If you joined a hardcore guild, they would require you to perform 100% every time. This is not possible if you cannot grasp the fact that there infact is a mathematically correct way of healing. Kungen of Nihilum has said that, when they recruited new people, these players were always 15-20% below Nihilum players the first two weeks of trial. These were all players from top 10 europe guilds, and best in their guild. After a month or so, they were somewhat on par with the core players in performance. They were forced to play in a whole different way to even stay in the guild. I know it's along time ago, but it's still true.

Imagine that your Guild Master told you "Okay, your gearscore is 480 so you will be expected to do 50k healing on average when we raid, if you dont, you're out". This is what would happen if you joined a hardcore guild.

Yeah, that's if you want to squeeze out the last few percent in a hardcore world-first guild. If you do not have that ambitions personal preference beats mathematically correct.

As a Holy in my raid group I tend to rarely use Renew. We're already have a Druid who blankets the raid with HoTs, I throw out my Lightspring and from then I tend to primarily use PoH, PoM and CoH for my assignment - raid healing. So for my playing style (which might not be a 100% optimal but fits me and works for our raid) mastery is worth more than the additional breakpoint on Renew.

Oh, and on topic: I prefer Holy, but that's just personal preference. Disc is very powerful if used right, but I'm so used to Holy that I have trouble managing and remembering all my CDs. I'm currently trying to get used to it though because it's just so powerful on a lot of fights.

Use both specs. It's a win-win situation. You can push enough DPS for dailys in a disc spec, and you need both if you're going to give serious raiding a try. As disc you can easily fill the role of a DPS and a healer at the same time in dungeons, with my 494 gear reforged to mastery I push over 40k single target DPS.

Haste vs Mastery
Mastery for both specs. There are two times you want to go haste>mastery. Either if you find yourself using a ton of renew, or if you run with too many healers which means your mastery hot gets sniped. Generally the best solution is to drop a healer, but that might be fight specific. Mastery provides far more HPM and generally more HPS if you run with an appropriate amount of healers and don't stick to LFR or normal modes too easy for your guild.

---------- Post added 2012-12-11 at 12:56 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Nestar

Long rant about haste > mastery

You forgot to take overhealing and number of healers versus damage output in to account. In theory, haste is great. In practice, Mastery usually wins. This may not be the case for a super casual guild happy with trolling each other while doing 10 man normal modes, but it does apply to more or less every more "serious" raider.

You forgot to take overhealing and number of healers versus damage output in to account. In theory, haste is great. In practice, Mastery usually wins. This may not be the case for a super casual guild happy with trolling each other while doing 10 man normal modes, but it does apply to more or less every more "serious" raider.

That actually helps my side of the argument even more, as mastery begins to overheal. When you've got multiple healers all using HoT based mastery more of it will get wasted. Haste will be better vs other healers, as you get the heal off before them.
The reason you're likely seeing better results with mastery comes down to mana issues though, if you stack haste you have a much higher likelyhood of going oom, and frankly when you do that you do 0 healing.

A fight like garalon with consistent raid damage that means you never actually top someone up is ideal for a mastery build when you literally cant over heal.
Look at the math I posted earlier on though, haste WILL produce higher output, provided you can keep up the mana. Just do the calculations based on spamming PoH assuming you can keep it up consistently (obviously not in a real life situation). Haste will come out higher in that case.

So, you guys agree that both priorities (Haste > Mastery and Mastery > Haste) can be viable, right? The rest is Min/Maxing for high end raiders and not casual raiders. Personally, I prefer Haste over Mastery aswell, not only because it says so in guides, but because I have tried both and it just feels better for me. But Mastery is definetly usable, especially in normal modes.

As for the original question, I have recently switched from holy to disc and didn't look back. The gameplay feels totally different and Disc requires more knowledge of the fight since you obviously aim to prevent damage instead of reacting to it. Also you bring Smite healing, which can "abuse" Boss mechanics where the boss takes extra damage. With the recent range increase a smart heal that deals damage is just awesome. Also Spirit Shell, I don't think there is anything I need to say about that ability other than freaking GREAT. So if you are the kind of guy who looks at guides before encountering a boss thinking "Oh, I can totally use my abilitys here to negate the mechanic", Disc is the spec to go. If you want a standard healer that does pretty well by comparision, Holy may be your choice.

I guess you were one of those priests who were spamming renew in 25 HC ICC and told people that it was the only viable playing style as a hpriest?

@ Sakamae , I couldn't have said it better. There is no simple black/white , right/wrong choice in healing.

Actually is was CoH on cooldown, PoM on cooldown, and Renew as filler. Flash heals occasionally with serendipity greaters and PoHs. PoH spam didn't become nearly as useful until 4.0, when chakra states were introduced.

As far as the debate goes, healing never occurs in a vaccuum. As long as you aren't casting the wrong spells, you'll do alright with either haste or mastery. It really does depend on your healing setup as to which you should stack. Haste works great for me, but there are times a higher mastery build would be more optimal.

Guides are great and all, but personally putting it into practice is key.

People with that attitude never perform to their fullest. If you joined a hardcore guild, they would require you to perform 100% every time. This is not possible if you cannot grasp the fact that there infact is a mathematically correct way of healing.

You inference is that you cannot perform 100% with a mastery build, is incorrect. Sure, mathematically there is a correct way of healing, however, other healers and random boss abilities throw that out of the window. Healing is only part science, unlike DPS, there is some art involved too.
In actual raid situations, I find people haste stacking often do so to boost their epeen/meter position via sniping even if they won't admit such.

Gearing for one single breakpoint, for a spell that will form a relatively small part of your total EH is in my eyes an extremely poor trade off even factoring in the reduced GCD benefit. And all those sites that are saying there is a set stat priority, more complete rubbish I'm afraid.

People really should learn to actually experiment for themselves, try different solutions and see what works for them and their raid.

Some of you seem to be considering the haste vs mastery debate in a vacuum where no other healers exist. or only exist when it helps your argument. To those saying EoL overheals loads, I say to you, push some serious progress and check. Echo of Light is amazing on many fights this tier.

Some of you may have read that and been offended or annoyed, I say to you, open your eyes and be less stubborn. I started progress striving for 4721, couldn't get there without making sacrifices that were poor choices, so tried mastery, and honestly was almost shocked. That comes from someone who previously haste stacked and virtually ignored mastery since it's introduction.

I'm with Sakamae on this, good solid advice for those with a bit less experience, and to the OP.